Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

His death, after a long illness, was announced by his family.

Sulzberger’s tenure, as publisher of the newspaper and as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Co., reached across 34 years, from the heyday of postwar America to the twilight of the 20th century, from the era of hot lead and Linotype machines to the birth of the digital world.

The paper he took over as publisher in 1963 was the paper it had been for decades: respected and influential, often setting the national agenda. But it was also in precarious financial condition and somewhat insular, having been a tightly held family operation since 1896, when it was bought by his grandfather Adolph S. Ochs.

By the 1990s, when Sulzberger passed the reins to his son, first as publisher in 1992 and then as chairman in 1997, the enterprise had been transformed. The Times was now national in scope, distributed from coast to coast, and it had become the heart of a diversified, multibillion-dollar media operation that came to encompass newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations and online ventures.

The expansion reflected Sulzberger’s belief that a news organization, above all, had to be profitable if it hoped to maintain a vibrant, independent voice. As John F. Akers, a retired chairman of IBM and for many years a Times Co. board member, put it, “Making money so that you could continue to do good journalism was always a fundamental part of the thinking.”

Reshaping The Times

Sulzberger reshaped The Times. In the mid-1970s, another financially difficult period in which he might have chosen to retrench, he expanded the paper to four sections from two, creating separate sections for metropolitan and business news and introducing new ones oriented toward consumers. They were a gamble, begun in the hope of attracting new readers, especially women, and advertisers.

Some critics dismissed the feature sections as unworthy of a serious newspaper. But the sections — SportsMonday, Science Times, Living, Home and Weekend — were an instant success and were widely imitated.

Over the next two decades, a billion-dollar investment in new printing facilities made more innovations possible, among them a national edition, special regional editions and the daily use of color photos and graphics.

“Adolph Ochs is remembered as the one who founded this great enterprise,” Richard Gelb, a longtime member of the Times board, said in 1997, when Sulzberger stepped down as chairman. “Arthur Ochs Sulzberger will be remembered as the one who secured it, renewed it and lifted it to ever-higher levels of achievement.”

At Sulzberger’s death, The Times was being run by a fourth generation of his family, a rarity in an age when the management of most U.S. newspapers is determined by distant corporate boards. A family trust, unaffected by his death, guarantees continued control by Adolph Ochs’ descendants.

It was no coincidence, Sulzberger believed, that some of the country’s finest newspapers were family-owned. “My conclusion is simple,” he once said with characteristic humor. “Nepotism works.”

His suggestions to editors and his criticisms tended to be delivered in a velvet glove, not with a mailed fist. “He didn’t have to be obeyed; he just wanted to be heard,” said Jack Rosenthal, a former editor of the editorial page.

Family business

Sulzberger involved himself far less with the content of the news columns than with the large business decisions that had to be made. It had been that way from the moment he was named publisher, on June 20, 1963, succeeding his brother-in-law Orvil E. Dryfoos, who had died of heart trouble a month earlier at age 50.

The line of Times publishers, from Adolph Ochs in 1896 to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. a century later, has run through the men in the family. Ochs had a daughter, Iphigene, but no sons. When he died in 1935, authority passed to Iphigene Ochs’ husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Iphigene and Arthur had three daughters: Marian, Ruth and Judith, called Judy.

Then came a son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, born Feb. 5, 1926. The father enjoyed composing light verse, and he celebrated this birth with an illustrated book describing the boy as having “come to play the Punch to Judy’s endless show.” The nickname stuck.

In 1961, his health deteriorating, the elder Sulzberger considered it time to step aside. His son was not considered as a possible successor. Many Times executives and even close relatives felt Arthur was too young and not up to the challenge. The family turned instead to Dryfoos, who was married to the oldest Sulzberger daughter, Marian, and who had been a senior Times executive for years. But two years into the job, Dryfoos was dead, and the family looked to the young Sulzberger. At 37, he became the youngest publisher in Times history.

The Times Co. that Sulzberger passed along in 1997 was light years from the one he inherited. Revenue in 1963 was $101 million, with The Times newspaper accounting for almost all of it. By 1997, the total was $2.6 billion, with the newspaper accounting for about half. In 2011, The New York Times Media Group, made up of The Times, The International Herald Tribune and their websites, accounts for 66 percent of the Times Co.’s total revenues of $2.3 billion.

As the years passed, Sulzberger turned his attention toward handing over leadership to the next generation. In 1992, his son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., took over as Times publisher.

Sulzberger joined the Marines in 1944. Trained as a radioman, Sulzberger went through the Leyte and Luzon campaigns in the Philippines, then landed in Japan as a jeep driver at Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters. He was discharged in 1946 as a corporal.

Five years later, with the Korean War on, he was called back to active duty. This time he received an officer’s commission and served as a public information officer in Korea before being transferred to Washington. He was a first lieutenant when he returned to civilian life in December 1952.

Between the military tours, Sulzberger got serious about academic work and received a bachelor of arts degree in English and history from Columbia University in 1951. In 1967, he became a life trustee.

While in college, in 1948, Sulzberger married Barbara Winslow Grant. They had two children, Arthur Jr., and Karen. The Sulzberger marriage ended in divorce. A few months later, in December 1956, Sulzberger married Carol Fox Fuhrman and the couple had a daughter, Cynthia, in 1964.

When he left as Times chairman in 1997, Sulzberger remained convinced that newspapers had a bright future.

“I think that paper and ink are here to stay for the kind of newspapers we print,” he said in a postretirement interview. “There’s no shortage of news in this world. If you want news, you can go to cyberspace and grab out all this junk. But I don’t think most people are competent to become editors, or have the time or the interest.”

“You’re not buying news when you buy The New York Times,” Sulzberger said. “You’re buying judgment.”

Milestones

• Pentagon Papers: Sulzberger read 7,000 pages of the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War before deciding to publish them, in a 1971 series exposing classified government accounts of the war. The series was stopped for two weeks when the Nixon administration won a court order suppressing it, saying national security was in jeopardy. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with The Times and The Washington Post, which had also begun publishing the reports.

• Free press: Sulzberger was publisher when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the newspaper in New York Times vs. Sullivan, which extended press protections from libel lawsuits by public officials.

• Pulitzers: The Times averaged more than one Pulitzer a year under Sulzberger’s tenure. The industry’s most prestigious prizes included a Public Service award in 1972 for the Pentagon Papers series, a national reporting award for the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. The Associated Press

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